By Anne Blythe
Ana Ilarraza-Blackburn becomes animated when talking about how immigrant communities are thrust into the state and national spotlight during election years.
Her voice grows louder, its cadence quickens and she unleashes an impassioned assessment about the negative health impact that political rhetoric can have on immigrant communities — especially those that are predominantly Hispanic.
“We’ve seen this over and over in North Carolina,” Ilarraza-Blackburn, founder and co-executive director of Women Leading for Wellness and Justice, told NC Health News.
Ilarraza-Blackburn also was a key speaker Sept. 9 during a news conference in Raleigh organized by El Colectivo NC, an umbrella membership group for Latino nonprofits, grassroots organizations and others.
They were there to protest an immigration bill that five Republican lawmakers had revived and revised several months after the General Assembly wrapped up most of its work for the session.
House Bill 10, or HB10 as the immigration bill is commonly called, requires North Carolina sheriffs to honor requests from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to detain people they want to pick up for possible deportation. The bill forces sheriffs to hold someone in their jails for up to 48 hours if federal immigration officers ask them to, even if they don’t have a warrant to detain that person after their scheduled release date.
The lawmakers from the state House and state Senate who negotiated the revised bill put it on the legislative agenda using a parliamentary procedure that does not run it through the typical committee vetting process or allow for amendments on the chamber floor.
The issue has created sharp political divides: Republican lawmakers generally support the proposal, and Democratic legislators generally oppose it. But beyond the politics, Ilarraza-Blackburn said, the bill has the potential to instill fear and anxiety in immigrant communities, adding stress that can take a heavy toll on their mental and physical health.
“The immigrant community constantly lives in trauma, and right when you think you can start to breathe, something else happens,” Ilarraza-Blackburn added.
The ripple effect
North Carolina’s foreign born-community is nearly eight times greater this year than it was in 1990, according to the state demographer, growing from 115,000 to 868,000 people today.
Most of them have been here a long time. Only 31 percent of those foreign-born immigrants arrived in North Carolina after 2009, state demographer Michael Cline wrote in February. Half of the foreign-born population was born in Latin America, with the next largest segment coming from Asia, he added.
In 2020, according to state demographers, North Carolina’s total Hispanic population was 1.1 million people, or 11 percent of the state’s residents. That number also includes the children of immigrants born here and newcomers from other states.
In May, when a previous version of HB10 was being debated, health care providers spoke about its potential ripple effect during a May 22 Zoom call organized by LATIN-19, an organization founded by Duke Health professionals to highlight systemic health care access issues that affect North Carolina’s Latino community.
“Folks stop driving. Folks stop going to the hospital when they need to,” Viviana Martínez-Bianchi, a physician from Durham and co-founder of LATIN-19, said at the time.
Researchers in North Carolina studied vital records data from 2012 and conducted individual and group interviews to determine the impact that immigration policies such as the 287(g) portion of the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Secure Communities program had on the use of health services among Hispanics and Latinos in this state.
They found that “Hispanic/Latina mothers sought prenatal care later and had inadequate care when compared with non-Hispanic/Latina mothers. Participants reported profound mistrust of health services, avoiding health services, and sacrificing their health and the health of their family members.”
Many of those concerns continue today. Children might worry about coming home from school to find that one or both of their parents have been detained or deported, health care professionals say — circumstances that prompt families to develop contingency care plans.
“We cannot ignore the profound harm that HB10 will cause,” Pilar Rocha-Goldberg, president of El Centro Hispano, an advocacy organization, said Sept. 9 outside the Legislative Building. “This bill not only strips away immigrant rights but also destroys the trust between law enforcement and our community.”
Calling on community health workers
Ilarraza-Blackburn said it will be important in the coming weeks and months for immigrant advocates to explain to immigrant communities what the bill does and does not do, so health needs will not be ignored.
She is a fan of the community health worker network that has been built up since the beginning of the pandemic, and she plans to advocate for making wider use of that system to share accurate information, and to create safe places for children.
Community health workers, or “promotores de salud” as they are called in Spanish, are an instrumental part of health care systems throughout Latin America. They are the trained people who go into neighborhoods and workplaces to deliver key public health messages. During the pandemic in North Carolina, they helped increase vaccination rates in communities of color. They also guided adults and children to COVID testing sites, providing a crucial bridge to health care systems that can be difficult to access for underserved populations.
Ilarraza-Blackburn said she hopes the community health workers can help get the word out that mental health care is available for adults and children struggling with the stress that such laws and political rhetoric create. They also want to encourage people not to delay routine health care, and to especially not delay it for fear of being stopped and detained by law enforcement officers.
“What a lot of the people don’t understand is a lot of the Latino community constantly lives in trauma,” Ilarraza-Blackburn said. “Whether people have papers or not, this is going to put a target on their backs.”
Olivia Moreno, a community health worker at El Centro Hispano, spoke at the May 22 LATIN-19 meeting about the importance of using the large communications network that has been developed over the past few years. Many immigrant communities had already started to panic in the spring when the bill was moving through legislative committees, she said.
“With panic come a lot of health issues,” Moreno said during the meeting.
“Then those [health issues] go from the mothers and the parents to the children,” Moreno added. “I’m worried about the community. Information is really important, but it is also important to provide information in as simple terms as possible because sometimes the community fails to understand the entire context.”
Four months later, that’s still the case.
Warrantless requests
Current law requires North Carolina sheriffs to look into the immigration status of anyone in their jails who is accused of a felony or driving while impaired. If sheriffs cannot determine the person’s status, they are supposed to contact federal immigration officials — who do further investigation and, in some cases, issue a 48-hour detainer request.
Detainer requests are just that — requests. They are warrantless, and compliance is not mandatory.
Because of that, some sheriffs — in largely Democratic counties such as Wake, Mecklenburg, Durham, Forsyth and Buncombe — have ended cooperation with federal immigration officers who ask them to continue to confine people suspected of a civil immigration violation beyond their scheduled release date. In Buncombe, Durham and Forsyth, the sheriffs added that they no longer would detain immigrants for ICE without a judicial warrant.
Their policies, they’ve said, are vital to ensuring that members of immigrant communities feel safe enough to call law enforcement when they are in need of assistance and protection.
Those stances have prompted Republican lawmakers on more than one occasion to put forward bills that would preempt the sheriffs. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper used his veto stamp to block some of those attempts before Republicans gained supermajorities in both legislative chambers in 2023.
Now Republicans leading both chambers are counting on having enough votes to override a veto. In the HB10 version approved last week, lawmakers also included unrelated budgetary provisions, such as Medicaid funding and close to half a billion dollars for vouchers for families with children attending private school.
The state Senate approved House Bill 10 on Sept. 9 in a vote that broke along party lines: 27 Republicans supported it, and 17 Democrats opposed.
The state House of Representatives followed suit Sept. 11 in a mostly party-line vote in support of the bill. All but three Democrats there voted against it.
Cooper is expected to veto this version of HB10, in part because of his opposition to lawmakers taking hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to spend on private school vouchers.
The immigration portion of the bill forces North Carolina sheriffs to determine if inmates in their jails arrested for certain felonies and misdemeanors are legal U.S. residents, and it makes it mandatory for the local law enforcement agencies to contact federal immigration officials if they cannot determine their status. They’d also be required to hold that inmate for up to 48 hours if asked to do so.
Two different views
Rep. Marcia Morey, a Durham Democrat and former state district court judge, questioned the timing of the revival of the immigration bill so close to the Nov. 5 elections, calling it a debate about “election talking points that are fueled by misinformation and prejudice.”
To underscore that point, Morey mentioned a baseless claim former president Donald Trump made during the Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing Haitian immigrants of eating the cats and dogs of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio.
“Nothing has really changed in this conference report other than it appears 50 days before an election and it echoes Trump’s calls for mass deportations,” Morey said. “This bill is based on fears and racial animus.”
Rep. Destin Hall, a Lenoir Republican, tried to soften criticism of the bill by offering a different perspective.
“What’s been described is nothing that’s in this bill,” Hall said. “It’s important to keep in mind that in this bill, we’re only talking about folks who are not only just here illegally, but that they’ve also been charged with a serious crime in our state — murder, rape, other violent crimes. Not driving without a license, which y’all often hear from folks. They say, ‘Well these folks have to work and they’ve got to drive.’ Well, this bill has nothing to do with that because driving without a license is not a felony, it’s not a violent crime.”
What the law will allow immigration officers to do, Hall said, is take people into federal custody from jails in a more controlled environment than they might encounter in workplaces, neighborhoods or the wider community.
“They want to focus their attention on folks who are committing crimes or who are in a jail,” Hall said. “That’s common sense, right? We don’t want law enforcement to get hurt. We don’t want bystanders to get hurt. We don’t even want the people who get detained to get hurt.”
In contrast, immigrant advocates say laws like these — and uncorroborated accusations such as those made during the presidential debate last week — can instill panic and paralysis in homes of law-abiding immigrants.
While most of the foreign-born populations are found in the state’s urban areas, working in construction, food services, manufacturing, medical care and high tech, according to the state demographer, there also are sizable communities in rural counties in agricultural jobs, food processing and other related industries.
Wendy Padilla, a new Orange County School Board member touted as the first Latina to serve in the role, spoke outside the Legislative Building on Sept. 9 before the Senate vote.
“It is wrong to attack immigrant families, and when I say immigrant, it’s everyone. But the main focus will be the Hispanic community,” Padilla said. “What is happening in these Hispanic homes? Children go to our schools. There’s more trauma being created by families being scared and used. There are definitely going to be a lot of children, maybe, missing school.
“So just think about how we are affecting the community as a whole. It is important that there’s no HB10 for our communities.”
It became clear during the pandemic how many of the foreign-born workers were essential frontline workers that kept grocery stores open, food processing plants going, construction projects progressing and more.
“Let’s be clear,” Sen. Natalie Murdock, a Durham Democrat, said. “These are our neighbors that are being attacked and targeted, overwhelmingly working people that are paying their taxes, simply getting up every day, trying to support their families.”
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